From the Archive - Lets do business
I have had to sort out some strange situations in my time, but the ones that really got my goat are where I uncovered criminally, outright deceit and rampant unprofessionalism. Here are a few examples. When reading these also consider that these people were negligent and compromising of their staff, who they sometimes threatened if they revealed what they up to.
The company can afford it
I was rebuilding a Communications business with the aid of a brilliant consultant. When we got to the books, we could not figure out or justify the loses being made. It turned out that a ‘Hostage Taker’ (refer to earlier post) had hived off a healthy portion of customer accounts, feeding their weekly revenues directly into his private bank account.
At the same business, we discovered that another ‘Hostage Taker’, was profiteering from selling off a portion of the company’s bandwidth to a competitor. His retort on being uncovered was that the “company can afford it”.
The Data Centre will cease to function
I found a team of highly stressed Operators and Systems Analysts (the very last people you want suffering from continual stress) as a result of a manager who every day regularly abused and demeaned his staff. When confronted about his outrageous behaviour, he utterly refused to change it, believing and stating that his staff were his to do as he pleased. When ultimately told that he was exiting to the organization, he said with total belief that “the Data Centre will cease to function if I leave”, and as is always the case in these situations, it clearly didn’t.
I’m not doing any harm
At yet another company I came across a long term, quite a senior manager who was always working feverishly hard but who also rarely ventured out of his office. Additionally, his staff were largely in the dark as to exactly what he was doing. In this case, the chap concerned was running three of his own businesses from his work office, using an array of the companies hardware and software services. He had quite a large enterprise running, with thousands of customers.